Alongside the "vanilla" Mate 9 — itself a beast of a phone — Huawei has unveiled a special limited edition Porsche Design version of the phone to be sold in stores throughout Europe, Asia and the Middle East starting in December.

Porsche Design already has a history of partnering with manufacturers on limited edition smartphones, though the most publicized were BlackBerrys that sought to stand apart through aesthetic alone. This time, Huawei actually has a strong foundation on which to build a special edition device, and the Porsche Design Mate 9 has a number of impressive aesthetic and performance differences to covet a glance in its direction.

The main differences between the Mate 9 and its Porsche Design equivalent are on the front: instead of a 5.9-inch 1080p LCD panel, the PD model has a 5.5-inch 2560x1440 AMOLED display with curved glass, bringing the fingerprint sensor to the front, below the screen. While that is sure to entertain comparisons to the Note line, Huawei has also given the PD Mate 9 an extra two gigabytes of RAM — 6GB in total — and 256GB of storage, up from 64GB on the regular Mate 9. The rest of the spec sheet is the same with a Kirin 960 SoC, an impressive dual camera setup, and a massive 4,000mAh battery.

The Porsche Design Mate 9 will go on sale later this year in European PD stores for €1395 (around $1550), expanding to "select" Huawei retail stores in Asia, Europe and the Middle East in January of next year.